New York City FC’s academy is barely three years old, and has fielded a full slate of US Soccer Development Academy teams for a fraction of that time. The club is still building out its physical infrastructure and has only signed two Homegrown Players, the most recent being young right back Joe Scally, unveiled on Wednesday.
The rest of MLS should be nervous just the same.
HGPs are now announced with enough regularity these days for longtime MLS observers to lapse into “ho-hum” mode. In fact Scally isn’t even the first 15-year-old signed in MLS over the past year; he’s the fifth. But this latest one in particular may have NYCFC’s league counterparts shifting uneasily in their seats.
Scally is a legit prospect, a modern, endline-to-endline right back who Patrick Vieira believes can smoothly slot into his first team’s uptempo, pass-happy system, which just happens to have the blue half of New York atop the MLS standings with a perfect 3-0-0 record in the early going of 2018.
Strong praise has already been directed towards James Sands, NYCFC’s first Homegrown, a defensive midfielder/center back whose technique, tactical IQ and unflappable nature made him a key player for the United States at the FIFA U-17 World Cup last year.
But this is about more, much more, than Scally and Sands. They’re only the first wave of what could develop into a pretty devastating flood of talent from NYCFC’s pipeline as the club’s investments in player development dovetails with the sheer scale of the New York metro area’s population and soccer culture.
US Youth Soccer, the country’s largest sanctioning body, calculated for the 2013/14 season that 112,716 children played the sport in its Eastern New York association, which includes the Gotham region and the rest of the state east of Route 81. New Jersey is even bigger, with more than 150,000 kids involved. Nearby Connecticut has 16,841.
That adds up to about a quarter of a million youth soccer players within the Tri-State catchment areas for NYCFC and the New York Red Bulls. That’s bigger than the adult population within the city limits of Salt Lake City - a simply enormous base for the pyramids being built for prospects like Sands and RBNY counterparts like Tyler Adams, Alex Muyl, Ben Mines and many others to climb.
While we should remain aware of the danger of dehumanizing kids who are at the end of the day just playing a game, there’s a very real numbers game at work in North America’s efforts to improve the quality and frequency of its young talent. Feeding greater numbers into one end of a (hopefully) more efficient development machine will over time lead to better products being churned out on the other side.
That’s the concept, even if it remains devilishly complicated to execute in reality. And big, mature markets like New York, Southern California, North Texas, Chicago and Atlanta have a serious scale advantage that already has MLS clubs in less populous regions scrambling to compensate and adapt. That's why you see teams like Sporting Kanas City heading to North Carolina to recruit players like Gianluca Busio.
NYCFC’s academy is a newcomer to the cutthroat landscape of Tri-State area youth soccer, and has had to depend on affiliations with more established clubs. Sands’ HGP eligibility — and much of his development — owes partly to City’s affiliation with his previous youth club, New York SC, where he played since age 10.
Yet NYC have already become a force to be reckoned with. They won the Premier Division of the 2017 Generation adidas Cup, headlined by star Gio Reyna (son of Claudio), Sands’ twin brother Will and a host of other blue-chip prospects. Their 2018 squad qualified for the top-end Champions Division and will face off against a fearsome array of foreign and domestic competition in Frisco, Texas starting Friday, including Real Madrid and Brazil’s Atletico Paranaense.
Their head coach, Matt Pilkington, is one of the more respected heads in American youth soccer, having previously played a central role in the tutelage of Gedion Zelalem and Jeremy Ebobisse. Today, he and his fellow NYCFC academy coaches appear to be working in close concert with Vieira.
“The premise is to go forward, to score and create, that’s our philosophy. That’s what we’re taking from the first team, that’s what we work towards,” Pilkington told me at last year’s GA Cup.
“It’s a young project – in its infancy, really. We’re just trying to continue to build and be patient and build slowly and do it the right way. And I think we’ve made great progress and we’re going to continue to make great progress as we grow, and as they go through our system. There’s some talented players here and now we just have to see how far we can develop them. Obviously moving them up to the first team is the goal.”
The Red Bulls have a major head start and some infrastructure advantages, and won’t be lapped by NYCFC anytime soon. But they and the rest of MLS have every reason to fear the rise of another development powerhouse in the Big Apple.
